Underused Google Analytics Features - Part Five

24.08.2009 Posted in Analytics

If you have a very large website, an overwhelming amount of information can be sent to Google Analytics. There are multiple ways to help deal with this, but today we’re going to look at separating portions of your website into custom profiles.

Just like in any statistics, being able to read and make use of the data web analytics provides is the most important part of spending time doing analysis at all. But if you’re looking at a content report and there are hundreds or thousands of pages that have pageviews, how do you take that in, let alone act on it? Do you scroll down through hundreds of rows until something stands out and catches your eye? Do you search for specific pages in the filter box (but then you need to know beforehand what to look for). A better idea would be to be able to do the same kind of analysis you would perform on a smaller site.

Creating multiple profiles can be a solution to this problem. Keep your main profile that includes the entire website, but make a few more: “Blog”, “Forum”, “Shop” or any other areas within your site that have enough pages to be websites themselves. They need to be areas where there is value to be gained from analysing them separately. Don’t separate out everything on your site, because you won’t be able to see how traffic flows from one portion to another. But if most of your forum traffic comes in, interacts with the forum, then leaves; it could well be worthwhile looking at it as a site on its own and being able to perform the analysis more easily.

There are two steps to setting this up. The first is to create a new profile.

Once the new profile has been created, it will start collecting data. It will import everything in the same way as the main profile, so the next step is to filter the traffic.

Above you can see a filter set up that will ignore all traffic that doesn’t meet the specs I have set. In this case, any traffic that doesn’t include “/blog” as a sub-directory is not going to be imported (remember that filters apply to the data before it reaches the GA reports - this adjustment is done and the remaining data is gone forever).

From now on, this will be imported and allow you to look at the traffic to just this portion of the site.

For instance, take a look at the chart below. These are visit metrics for a one month period.

The spike in the middle was as a result of one set of pages in the site in question. It means that everything else in comparison looks quite small and it’s more difficult to see the variances across the rest of the site. By creating a profile that excludes that portion of the site, we can suddenly see all the detail again:

This same result can be achieved by two other methods: manually filtering out certain pages/sub-directories in the filter box at the bottom of the report, or creating an advanced segment to block all traffic to that portion of the site. However, the former only lasts for the one search, and the latter is user-specific. If you want other people in your organisation to be able to see this then a custom profile is a simple way to set this up.

However, the downside is that because filters on profiles work when the data comes in, you will not see historic data in your profiles. Only traffic that has arrived since you set it up.

In part six of this series: using sampling for high traffic websites.